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Hoist Him by His Own Petard

UPDATE: Yeh, Daschle withdrew his name, but based on his own words and deeds, he needs to be put to work making little rocks out of big ones PDQ (along with Geithner and whatsername), or The Obamassiah and his cronies in Congress are revealed as lying dirtbag scum of the earth. Oops. Too late for that, because it’s already clear that this administration (and its cronies in Congress) are as crooked as a dog’s hind leg. Anyone keeping tally of the tax cheats that Obama wants in his cabinet and staff? Anyone want to tally that against eight years of the Bush administration? (Yeh, yeh, I still hold that Bush should have been impeached for failure to faithfully execute the office of the president, in violation of his oath–based on his evisceration of immigration enforcement–but that’s another issue… )

Via The Corner, h.t. Adam’s Blog, The One’s nomination to be secretary of Health and Human speaks from the time capsule:

“Make no mistake, tax cheaters cheat us all, and the IRS should enforce our laws to the letter.” Tom Daschle, Congressional Record, 5/7/98, p. S4507

As it happens, I agree with Tom Daschle on this point. Heck, let’s see some prison time, on top of taxes and penalties, for the guy who cheated on over $146,000 in taxes: Tom Daschle. If tax fraud was good enough to send Al Capone to jail, then it’s barely good enough for politicians who are tax cheats.

Trackposted to Rosemary’s Thoughts, Political Byline, Conservative Cat, and DragonLady’s World, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

“petard”–small bomb; “hoist by his own petard”–lifted by his own bomb, blown up by his own action, sat on his own grenade if you will. I say, therefore, let’s sit Daschle on his own grenade, hold him to his own words, rigorously, firmly, without mercy. Jackass.

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Procrastination

I really should be making hay while the sun shines, getting with the program, and all sorts of other clichés. *heh* But. Last night was a loooooong night. No pressing appointments today. Things–many!–to do, but

Lethargy. All my vigor’s seeping out of me,
Now I’m barely rising to my knee,
Oh, lethargy came over me…

(You know the tune. Some sing other words to it, like, “Leprosy. All my skin is falling off of me… “ *heh*)

All I wanna do is nap, but I’m getting some things–“needful things”–done that will stand me in good stead when my schedule picks back up tomorrow. Still, I’m definitely NOT getting the chainsaw out and whittling away at the woodpile or cutting down those small trees I need to give our new neighbors. (They have a nice 3-walled shed to dry the wood in for their fireplace.)

Nope. Right now, I’m just getting used to my second keyboard/mouse combo in two weeks. Yeh, yeh. Got ’em both for less than the retail on one. Loved the keyboard on the first combo (a Gateway branded wireless combo) but hated the mouse. Stiff buttons and wheel. Really stiff. The mouse my Wonder Woman has (at work) from the mate to the Gateway set I was using was much better. Just individual differences, I guess. So, when I ordered her a nice lil Logitech wireless mouse for her notebook, I picked up a Logitech keyboard/mouse combo for me at the same time.

*sigh* Love the mouse. The keyboard’s not nearly as nice as the Gateway branded keyboard, though. Feels kinda cheesy. Oh. Well. I can either add the Gateway-branded sensor back on and use the keyboard that goes with that or get used to this keyboard. I think I’ll try for the latter for now. Sure do like this mouse, though.

BTW, what the heck ever happened to LED indicators for CAPS/NUMLOCK, etc.? Maybe it’s a power-saving thingy. Oh, well. I’ll stuff some high-density foam under the CAPSLOCK key anyway pretty soon now so I don’t have to deal with my indifferent typing skills resulting in inadvertent ALL CAPS typing.

Oh, the “old” wireless keyboard/mouse combo? Spare. Always need spares. 🙂

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Considering Windows 7

I’ve had a love-hate (more like, “moderately friendly/utterly despise”) relationship with Microsoft since about DOS 4 (known to some of us as DOG 4), and even in the halcyon times of Windows 3.X, I preferred running those drafty Windows versions on top of IBM’s PCDOS or Novell DOS.

I suffered through the cranky, creaky, crappy Windows 95, the almost good Windows 98 (and the “quite acceptable for most uses” 98SE… with some appropriate thefts from–> ), passed on the Muppet Edition, found NT4 useful and Win2K to be Just Right (for most things), never warmed much to XP and was appalled at the truly bad decisions that brought out the bloated resource hog, Vista.

In spite of my gripes, I’ve found Ubuntu 8.04/8.10 to be better overall than most Microsoft OS offerings, for most things (still sucks dead bunnies through a straw for midi creation).

But the rumbles going on about Windows 7 intrigue me. Seriously. I meant to install and evaluate the beta in January, but things just got in the way. I’m way off schedule on things, already, for February, but I hope to get to taking a serious look at Windows 7 this month. For one thing, this caught my eye:

…Windows 7, unlike Vista, has a small footprint and is not a resources glutton. I know this to be a fact because I have the beta version running on my Eee PC and it works fine – and it’s just a beta!

Intriguing. Me$$y$oft publish unbloated code? Could be a Very Good Thing. Since I’m considering a netbook purchase this year for myself, this could be a Very Very Good Thing indeed. And my Wonder Woman would probably appreciate some sort of Windows on the HTPC I might install this year, so if Windows 7 is at all acceptable, it could well be a candidate for that PC.

Even if I do make such a move though, it’d still leave three or more ‘nix boxes on our lil network–and maybe more, since I know an old Compaq (seriously spiffed up hardwarewise) will be going online this month with PCBSD, and when Son&Heir gets his softmods done on his old XBox, that’ll be another.

But the early reports on Windows 7 bode well for a new computer or two here at twc central using the OS. If it really pans out like the early press indicates.

UPDATE: *heh* This guy claims to have installed Windows 7 on a 600Mhz box w/only 512MB of RAM. If so–and the video of him doing it is compelling!–I have a few computers to try the 32-bit version on just sitting around unused. Need a DVD drive for ’em, though (yeh, they’re that old).

Update#2: Oh, heck, why not. *heh* Since I removed the “personal media drive” connectors and backplate, I have two more ready-made places (one in the bottom of the case) for SATA drives–and three open SATA connections on the MOBO. In addition, since I probably will remove the DVDROM drive from this computer for the old comp I’ve singled out to try the 32-bit Win7 on, I can install another drive–either SATA or IDE, in that bay, cover the bay opening and bob’s your uncle. While I seriously doubt I’ll add three more drives to this rig, I could, so even though I dislike the idea, I could easily do a dual boot of Win7 (64-bit) and Ubuntu 8.10 (64-bit)… and I might do just that.

Trackposted to The Pink Flamingo, Faultline USA, Democrat=Socialist, Walls of the City, The World According to Carl, and DragonLady’s World, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

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Groundhog Day

While the Emperor tries on yet another set of new clothes today, the Repugnican’ts, who’ve, among other recent egregious sins, proffered their own approval of a fox to rule the henhouse to please His Royal Haughtiness, look ready to continue to bend over backwards while straddling a fence , the Earth mocks The Goracle while seemingly readying for Fimbulwinter1 and the Little Foxes2 lay their plans to spoil the vinyard.

Can it be that the groundhog won’t even emerge to view its shadow today? If he’s half as smart as a head of cabbage, Mr. Groundhog will curl up in his den and dream of being the Rip Van Winkle of the animal kingdom.

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Why I Didn’t Answer Your Email

It was lost in a sewer backup, according to eWeek’s report on a Panda Security finding.

…according to a new study issued by researchers at AV specialists Panda, the astonishing amounts of spam and malware attacks that arrive at companies electronic doorsteps each day is shockingly over 90 percent.

Yes, that’s right, according to Panda’s survey of 430 million e-mail messages received by its customers during the last year, only 8.4 percent were legitimate.

So, while you may or may not have missed an email from me because of toxic sludge clogging your inbox, I imagine a lot of email is lost in this clutter, no matter how–or perhaps because–email server admins may labor to block SPAM. How much legitimate email is accidentally blocked by legitimate attempts to block spam we may never know. It’s part of the price we pay for not being civilized enough to track spammers down and burn them alive, sell their children into slavery and eradicate their names from the face of the earth. Instead, we all pay the price of our limp-wristed approach to this evil scum.

Oh. Well. You’ll never know if I missed your email because I filter my accounts through my hosting service’s spam blocker, or if I simply ignored it (surely not!)… or if my answer was filtered by YOUR spam filtration. *heh* All I know is that my inbox is now down to a few spam emails a week, where once I was receiving 1,000s. Since I don’t have the cojones to track spammers down, burn them alive, etc., I guess I will just have to live with that.

Trackposted to Nuke’s, Political Byline, Faultline USA, The World According to Carl, The Pink Flamingo, Cao’s Blog, Leaning Straight Up, and Democrat=Socialist, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

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A Word About Ubuntu Forums

I’ve had remarkably good experiences, for the most part, finding helpful information on the Ubuntu Forums site when I ran into something puzzling about the OS that wasn’t readily dealt with via my normal troubleshooting efforts. I’ve seen some threads where some self-important twit mocked folks for asking for help in a manner they felt was beneath them to answer, but only rarely. I’d never experienced something like that myself until today. A quick crosspost:

Quote:Originally Posted by mnmus

I have a similar problem. Yesterday, Nautilus reported over 221GiB gree space on my drive (out of a nominal 400gig drive with a little over 20gig reserved for swap file/extended. (GParted has never seen more than about 380GiB of that, normal for drive/OS)

Today, after applying recommended updates (mostly security-related, IIRC), I can do very little as Nautilus reports 0 bytes free space on the drive. That means, of course, that Thunderbird won’t download mail–or even allow me to delete mail, and anything that requires any disk space usage–apart from swap file, apparently, is an exercise in futility. Heck, my saved sessions in Opera and Firefox disappeared, as well.

Oh, GParted reports that I have about 10GiB free apart from swap space, out of the ~362GiB it sees on my primary partition… quite a bit less than the 221GiB available yesterday.

Additional pieces of the puzzle:

Nautilus reports only 137.2GiB of files, adds that “some contents are unreadable”–something like another couple hundred GiB “unreadable”?

*sigh* I’ve had petty lil things regularly go south after updates (sound, video, etc.) but never a couple hundred gig of storage just go *poof!* before. For something like this, I’d almost switch back to *shudder* Windows. (More likely, I’d back up my Home folder to an external drive, nuke Ubuntu and install Puppy Linux, Suse Linux, PC-BSD–even though importing my data might be a lil less straightforward–or something else equally well-behaved, instead of what has turned out to be a very cranky Ubuntu… *profound sigh*).

Any suggestions about what the heck is going on?

The time it took you to post this long whining post, you could have posted the outputs of those commands in my previous reply. Then, somebody could have figured out what’s wrong with your disk space!

Indeed, the guy who responded to my post is correct: I could have posted the information he referred to; in fact, I already had it on hand. But. That same jackass had told the originator of the thread I posted to to post the same information… two weeks ago. The thread originator had done so and… *crickets chirping* Mr. Jackass had made no further reply in that time. Indeed, had Mr. Jackass been paying any attention, he’d have seen that the major information resulting from the suggested commands was already contained in my post, just confirmed from other apps within the GUI.

I’m glad of one thing. The above took place online. If the jackass had sneered in my face like that in person, I might be having to find a place to hide the body. *heh* OK, so maybe not. ONE of us would likely be looking for a place to hide the body… 🙂 Well, perhaps not, but he’d sure feel like he had had a new anal orifice installed… (because the one he is using to form words with is past due for replacement).

And it still leaves my issue unadressed: how the heck to I access my hard drive space? Oh, I can access it using root priviledges, either from the command line or by invoking Nautilus with root priviledges, but that doesn’t help if I want to create a text file or a spreadsheet or even check my mail using Thunderbird–or even save a session in one of my browsers.

Here’s a tiny little piece of the puzzle. Nautilus, reporting after deleting a little over 30GiB of no longer needed data and programs, now reports an awesome 1.4GiB free space!

free-space

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Maleable words

So, after two–regularly scheduled–days off, Son&Heir drove in to work on (state) roads that are clear of ice. That our street, and the streets connecting to the first state road here around America’s Third World County Central, are still sheet ice covered with packed snow is immaterial: he can drive on three day old stuff like that. It’s a 30-minute drive, but traffic’s usually only bumper-to-bumper for about 2.5-3.0 miles of it, so it’s not too bad.

Of course, fellow “workers” who live right down the street from his place of employment “couldn’t make it in” and so he’s alone at work today.

He says he now knows why that town’s motto is, “Come to visit; come to stay”. Because the roads are so bad you can’t get out. I’m thinking it may be another reason: because staying too long makes folks too stupid and lazy to find a route out.

Interesting motto. Lots of ways it could be read…

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Shadetree Tech: Dreadlock Wigs and Chicken Bone Rattles

“Make the world go away… ” Thanks Eddie Arnold (and Hank Cochran) for that thought. In that spirit, no politics, social commentary or whatever from the “news” here, just play time for (low) techies.

Think back to “shadetree mechanics” and… begin.

Some of the fun of playing around with computers is attempting to use them–and “(in)appropriate” peripherals–for purposes they weren’t originally intended for. Now, we’ve all done that with computers from time to time: made them into hardware firewalls/routers, print servers, doorstops, boat anchors, shelving supports and more–or at least I assume we’ve all done so. *heh*

Ran across a neat lil peripheral recently as the result of some printing woes here at twc central. Background: because I’m a cheap, tightwad of a curmudgeon, I decreed some time ago that we all simply share one printer on the network (nice to be the potentate ruling my own domain *heh*). Currently, that printer is a nice HP AIO with memory card reader that’ll catch the memory cards from any (digital) camera in the house, scan, copy, print, etc. Then, along came my (completely unnecessary) upgrade of Ubuntu from 8.04 to 8.10. Since the printer at issue is connected to this computer (I have the largest desk, so by default EVERYTHING gravitates to it), naturally sharing ANYTHING–not just the printer–died with the upgrade.

*sigh* I fixed network shares pretty easily, except for the printer. Went right down the line by “the book”–no joy. Went off book with a vengeance. No joy. Hassled with the thing off and on for a couple of days and gave in and bought the HP Wireless Printing Upgrade Kit. Got my confirmation email from amazon.com that it had been shipped.

Shazam!! Printer magically appeared on other computers as shared.

Isn’t that the way it always works? Better than wearing a dreadlock wig and shaking a chicken bone rattle while mumbling arcana and dancing around, perhaps shrieking like a bansidhe* to boot. Just buy something to fix a problem and the problem disappears. *heh*

So, now I have the HP Wireless Printing Upgrade Kit and no need for it. What to do? Go ahead and screw up the working network printing by installing the kit and then spending days getting IT working? (Altogether too likely *heh*) I don’t think so. So, what else is the thing good for?

Looked at the thing. Can’t tell anything from the outside, so just thought over what topology the kit would have to introduce/fit into to work as advertised. Checked out the “advanced” setup mini-micro-nano-information on the CD concerning using the thing on an existing wireless network. *heh* “Looks like it’s just an access point and a wireless adapter the software configures for the printer use,” me thought. Plugged the part that looks like a thumb drive or wireless network adapter for a n otebook into this computer, enabled wireless networking, entered the network key and… bob’s your uncle. (Of course, enabling wireless networking has meant the wireless connection has usurped my network connection from my wired ethernet, but since the MIMO capabilities on my Netgear WPN824 seem to be used by the lil wireless adapter, I’m getting very nearly the same throughput I do with wired ethernet.)

Next up: installing the unit designed for (USB) attachment to the printer to the network elsewhere (say, an old XBox, using an already adapted XBox cable–a simple hardware hack) and see if it’ll act as the wireless access point it would seem it is. Heck, I might get more use out of this for entertainment value than by using it for its intended purpose. And, if networked printing goes south on me again, I can always pop this lil puppy out and install it for its intended purpose, eh?

Now, how can I retask that old 2.5′ tall P-II server I had made into a router/firewall… Ahhh! Attach it to the network as a subnet and play with the lil kit items on it. Hey! Might be able to make that back into my primary router/firewall, since its firewall capabilities exceed similar functions in the Netgear router…

All kinds of fun to keep me occupied away from getting more important stuff done, if I want it to let it. 😉

(Yes, this post does indicate I’m semi-sorta-kinda “icebound” for now. Just do not want to navigate the hill out of our lil neighborhood on the sheet ice I walked earlier.)

*”Bansidhe”–Don’t complain to me about the spelling! Complain to the bansidhes, if you dare! Spell it “banshee” if you want, but don’t come running to me if you wake up with one of ’em shrieking under your window at night because of your inconsiderate spelling…

Note to any bansidhes reading this: I really, really need my sleep, and I tried to discourage folks from disrespectful spellings referencing your class, so lay off, OK? 😉

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“…like the ice storm of 2007… “

That’s the comment from an email from the desk of the county’s school superintendent that caught my eye. I hope not, since I have procrastinated getting our stand of sycamores trimmed back, and the deadfalls (well, they were dead after they were pulled down from the trees) from the last ice storm are still “in process,” getting cut up for different lil (and not so little) furniture projects. Oh, and then there’s the whole deadfalls taking-out-POTS-line and spiking through storage shed roof thing. Some of ’em last time were bigger in diameter than my thighs. Much bigger. The lil being without power for a few weeks (and water much of that time) wasn’t a patch on the cleanup.

At least the electric company has been vigorously and regularly trimming trees since the last power outage. Now, instead of ice on the lines AND massive chunks of lines downed by trees, it’s only iced lines that are a potential issue. Much better.

Looking forward to cleanup. *sigh* Oh. Well. I need the exercise.

On another note, neither of our children were living here at the time of the last major ice storm. Lovely Daughter was living 35 miles south and Son&Heir 35 miles north (still in college). This time, both are working down south. Roads Not Good. Lovely Daughter has a place to stay for the evening. Son&Heir does too, but he’s waffling about staying/coming back when he gets off around 10:00. We strongly recommended staying over. Strongly. I’ve slid a car off the road on black ice (traveling under 30mph… more than 30 years ago), under better conditions than he’d be driving in. Our neighborhood streets are solid ice, now, and WILL NOT be scraped/sanded until at least tomorrow, so sliding off the road (and into a neighbor’s front room) on the way down the hill to a sharp hairpin onto our street’s not out of range of the possible. We’ve had a couple of cars slide off the road that’s up a 15′ 80-degree hill above our street slide off the street and down into our front yard in years past, so it’s not inconceiveable. Don’t want to get a call to come collect him out of a bar ditch.

Oh, well. He’s living here, but he’s his own adult and can make his own decisions.

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Here’s the problem…

The problem with government solving our problems–whether it’s a government of kings and dukes and earls or a government of presidents and senators and congressmen–is that rulers “fix” problems to suit themselves.

Ponder that one, Pinky.

Words to chill the soul:

“I’m from the government; I’m here to help.”